Doubly so if you're playing a race which uses a variant of another ship type as it's scout craft.
This leads to the player being encouraged to keep scouts separate from thier main fleet just to make them easier to identify, which for the Haduir player is less than great. Because keeping idle ships anywhere but the 'home' gate is a huge disadvantage.

It would be nice if any ship ship equipped with scanners gets either:

• - Some form of overlay which re-colours some portion of the ship to orange (or other suitable colour)
  - A glow/highlight behind the ship icon in the fleet view

When the player faction annexes/absorbs another empire, they gain the ability to build thier ships.
And the player will also likely gain control of a non-trivial number of ships which will almost certainly need to be updated.
Which leads to an annoyance.
Ship types in the new fleet which share the same name as ship types in the existing fleet do not have thier designs passed to the player.
Which requires the player then go into to the design screen and make new designs for the ships he already has in order to update them. And this needs to be done for multiple ship types for every annex event.
It is very annoying having to re-design things from scratch when I know those designs existed for my ally to have built those ships in the first place.

The duplication of names is really not important at all, simply because different races ships look different.
Visual identifation is both quicker and more intuitive than trying to identify ships by class name.
When the player annexes an ally, please can ALL the ally's current ship design templates be transferred over. Duplicate names really don't matter, and it's far less effort to delete designs than create them.

There may be the opportunity to expand on an existing feature - the derelict ship exploration event.
As it stands, if disovered the player is presented with the option to gain either money or research. Nothing wrong with that, it's simple and easy to parse.
If there were a desire to expand on this, a third option could be added to a number of these events where the derelict is intact enough to be explored.
And this might result in a number of outcomes, such as the ship being intact enough to:

• - be recycled into useful materials (Gives money and metal)
  - allow your explorer to add partial credit towards a single technology (weighted toward any 'unknown' equipment still on the ship)
  - be recovered and reparied for your own use (Gives an almost empty hull)

Not all options will always be available.

The ships could be drawn from the Ashdar, Gremak and Human types (to represent the previous war), and could be any class from destroyer up to heavy cruiser. Any of the larger ships might be 'too much'. Although the larger ships could be included in any 'rolls' which do not allow the recovery option.
The ships themselves would be mostly empty of equipment, with only a few equipment slots being occupied, and incapable of independant movement until they are repaired at a colony.
To this effect, choosing to recover a derelict would add that ship to the scout's fleet and automatically set course for the nearest owned colony at a reduced speed as the scout tows the ship home.
It could then be refitted manually as if it were a captured ship.
It may also be useful to consider flagging any such ships so they only ever produce generic research progress if reverse engineered if you wish to prevent the player circumventing the initial exploration choice.

Not really a super important thing, but may be useful to add some 'fluff and flavour' to the game once more vital tasks are completed.